Columnist: Pentagon Futures Market Had Potential

August 1, 2003 | Wall Street Journal

The author of a commentary reports that this week, after a Congressional backlash, the Pentagon detonated its plan to launch a futures-trading market to price the risk of terrorist attacks. When word of the "terror market" idea got out, the political calculus drained support from what critics called an absurd, even offensive, idea. "That's a shame: Done right, it might have been an indispensable tool," the columnist writes. For many years, an institution linked to the UNIVERSITY OF IOWA has run a futures market in elections. The predictions derived from prices set in these markets have often been far more accurate than polls -- unsurprisingly, since people put their money where their thoughts were.